In a less developed or frontier system, nobody is going to be authenticating transponders against the shipping registry. They may not even be able to do that. So broadcasting a fake ID would not cause suspicion. Having no working transponder at all -- again, assuming that this lack can be detected -- would nearly always make people nervous about you. In a more capable or central system, not having a working transponder will buy you a quick interception by the local equivalent of the coast guard, followed by a fix-it ticket, a hefty fine, or a barrage of laser and missile fire depending on how things evolve from there.

Just as everybody agrees on the technical specs that make email, the web, DNS, and so forth work more or less uniformly everywhere today, even across hostile borders, I imagine that there's a consensus on things like transponder protocols in Traveller's known space as well. Much like the case for net tech, uniformity just makes things so much easier on everyone that it's likely to happen naturally. And again, if you're relying on public-key cryptography for authentication, you don't need proprietary hardware or software to participate. I'll bet the Vargr *love* open source software, and that every project has about five forks per year. :)


On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 4:39 PM Phil Pugliese (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
With the plethora of various & assorted polities thruout known space, I've always DGP's 'transponder doctrine' to be, at best, impractical.

I just can'r see all those vargrs really caring very much & then there's the pirates.

Since we know that piracy is still present, despite all the attempts to 'eradicate' it here on the TML & elsewhere, just use whatever technique they use.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Tuesday, April 2, 2019, 6:14:11 AM MST, Bill Rutherford <xxxxxx@comcast.net> wrote:


All,

In canon, can a ship record another ship's transponder broadcast, and
rebroadcast it, essentially taking over that ship's identity?

I've found very little online and the only printed reference that
discusses it much at all is the Starship Operator's Manual Vol 1,
published by Digest Group back in 1988.  Their "short version" is
that the transponder is in an essentially unbreakable black box that
requires a licensed technician to reprogram (i.e. change the signal
being sent).

One of my players is intent on sending a bogus transponder signal but
doesn't want to go so far as altering the black box.  His plan is
"harvest" a transponder signal sent by a random ship after turning
off his own ship's black box.

So - back to my original question, would this work?

One obstacle I can think of would be if the transponder sends some
sort of authentication code based on a "seed" of some sort (kind of
like the way a Symantec cybertoken uses a random number seed only
elsewhere held on a Symantec server somewhere) which would be more
difficult than most would be willing to deal with - to duplicate.

What other obstacles, other than saying "That's now how they
work!  You cannot rebroadcast somebody else's transponder signal
because the Imperium, in their wisdom, incorporated handwavium into
the transponder that precludes this sort of thing" might there be?

In advance, thanks!


Bill Rutherford

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